I have several Hue ZigBee dimmer buttons and a couple have started showing random battery life reports.
Picture below shows one unit that was replaced 4 weeks ago, I bought the best coin batteries I could find but still they only last a short time. When new I can recall these units lasting about a year or more so something is going on.
I have checked the map and it is connected pretty closely to a mains powered router so distance is not a thing, the actual buttons only get used maybe once or twice a day so over-use is not a concern.
Is there any fix, I cant keep feeding them expensive batteries and none of my switches have a neutral plus I use smart bulbs throughout so a shelly is probably not going to help - these buttons all have multiple functions as well.
Battery monitoring is never very accurate - it’s a chemical process, not one that can be represented in percentages. You may find that the reading goes up again after a while.
When you replaced the batteries, had the devices actually stopped working?
It’s possible that they might not be sleeping for some reason, but the only thing I’ve found that really does affect battery life is temperature. A device in the fridge is likely to run down much more quickly.
I did some reading and it seems there is a battery reset - leave it out for 5 minutes. I did this and when replaced it shot back up to 100% and is still there.
I then tried two other remotes on 43% and 38% but on replacing the cells these changed to 12% and 22% so not sure what goes on here lol.
I usually change them before they die - i have HA check each day and message me when a device reports 20% or less. I think I’ll ignore until they drop off the network, but no idea what changed as they used to be stable in the history but are now all up and down all over the place.
There’s a new app for monitoring battery levels, and I notice that it defaults to 15% for warnings. I don’t know if there’s anything scientific behind that.
Are there any other battery monitors - the Battery Sentinel looks good but the email setup does not work. I opened a case on the GitHub page but it was deleted without action so I’m not too impressed with that really.
Surely if you make an app, some basic support is a good idea?
This works pretty well for monitoring but you have to create your own automations for notifications.
I moved to Battery Sentinel because Battery Notes creates a set of duplicate entities for its own use (about 40 in my case) - so for sensor.motion_sensor_battery you also get sensor.motion_sensor_battery_plus. Things got a bit cluttered.
I’m not a fan of clutter so I’ll skip that one i think. I’ve logged a new bug report on GitHub so will wait a while to see if it gets a view or deleted again
